Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts

By Susanna Drake

As Christian leaders in the first through fifth centuries embraced ascetic interpretations of the Bible and practices of sexual renunciation, sexual slander—such as the accusations Paul leveled against wayward Gentiles in the New Testament—played a pivotal role in the formation of early Christian identity. In particular, the imagined construct of the lascivious, literal-minded Jew served as a convenient foil to the chaste Christian ideal. Susanna Drake examines representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings that use accusations of carnality, fleshliness, bestiality, and licentiousness as strategies to differentiate the "spiritual" Christian from the "carnal" Jew. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome, Origen of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom portrayed Jewish men variously as dangerously hypersexual, at times literally seducing virtuous Christians into heresy, or as weak and effeminate, unable to control bodily impulses or govern their wives.

As Drake shows, these carnal caricatures served not only to emphasize religious difference between Christians and Jews but also to justify increased legal constraints and violent acts against Jews as the interests of Christian leaders began to dovetail with the interests of the empire. Placing Christian representations of Jews at the root of the destruction of synagogues and mobbing of Jewish communities in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Slandering the Jew casts new light on the intersections of sexuality, violence, representation, and religious identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812208245

Book preview

Slandering the Jew

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Slandering the Jew

Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts

Susanna Drake

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Drake, Susanna.

Slandering the Jew : sexuality and difference in early Christian texts / Susanna Drake. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Divinations : rereading late ancient religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4520-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Sex—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. 2. Christianity and other religions—Judaism—History—Early church, ca. 30–600. 3. Judaism—Relations—Christianity—History—Talmudic period, 10–425. 4. Church history—Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600. I. Title. II. Series: Divinations.

BR195.S48D73 2013

261.2'609015—dc23

2012047257

To Richard Drake

and to the memory of

Julia Angevine Drake

Thomas Strickler

and Mildred Martin Strickler

Contents

Introduction

1.   The Making of Carnal Israel: Paul, Barnabas, Justin

2.   Origen Reads Jewishness

3.   Sexual/Textual Corruption: Early Christian Interpretations of Susanna and the Elders

4.   "A Synagogue of Malakoi and Pornai": John Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Jews

Conclusion

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Antioch, 386 CE

In his first sermon against the Jews, delivered in Antioch in the autumn of 386 CE, John Chrysostom told a story of an abduction in which a defiling and unfeeling man forced a Christian woman, elegant and free, well-behaved and faithful, to enter a synagogue. The woman resisted her attacker. She pleaded with Chrysostom to help her. Heroically, the newly ordained priest came to her rescue: I was fired with jealousy, Chrysostom said, and burning with anger, I rose up, I refused to let her be dragged into that transgression, I snatched her from the hands of her abductor! I asked him if he was a Christian, and he said he was…. I told him he was no better than an ass if he, who said that he worshiped Christ, would drag someone off to the dens of the Jews who had crucified him.¹ This licentious abductor claimed to be a Christian, but, in Chrysostom’s eyes, he was tainted with the stain of Jewishness. The abductor believed that an oath sworn in the synagogue was more powerful than one sworn in the church. It was precisely this sort of dangerous religious hybrid—this impure half Christian²—that Chrysostom railed against in his sermons Adversus Iudaeos. The sexualized depiction of the heretical Christian- Jew as a male predator who preyed upon pure Christian women was not lost on Chrysostom’s audience.³

In Adversus Iudaeos, John Chrysostom frequently depicted Jews and so- called Judaizers as lascivious wolves in pursuit of innocent Christian sheep, and he asserted that he himself was the good shepherd who protected the sheep from their Jewish predators.⁴ His self-presentation as a stalwart guardian of Christian women went hand in hand with the gendered and sexualized portrayal of his religious opponents. Delivered at a time when the church in Antioch was more imperial than imperiled, his first sermon against the Jews made use of this narrative of violent abduction and aggression to map differences between true Christians and their heretical Others, Jews and Judaizers especially. Chrysostom’s portrait of a heretical Judaizer luring a pure(ly) Christian woman into the synagogue was just one example of how he denigrated his opponents by constructing them as sexual aggressors.

By the fourth century, the depiction of Jews and Judaizers as carnal, sexual deviants had become a topos in early Christian texts. Writing several decades before Chrysostom in 344, Aphrahat, the Christian sage of Persian Mesopotamia, claimed that Jewish interpreters of his day stumbled in their interpretation of scripture because of their lasciviousness and the immodesty of their bodies.⁵ Jews had it backward, he asserted. Rather than associating purity and holiness with virginity, as Aphrahat would have it, Jews thought that purity and holiness were achieved through marriage and sexual reproduction.⁶ Eighty years later in Roman North Africa, Augustine, like Aphrahat before him, insisted that Jewish carnality was rooted in Jewish hermeneutical error: Behold Israel according to the flesh, Augustine wrote, quoting Paul’s phrase in 1 Cor 10:18. This we know to be the carnal Israel; but the Jews do not grasp this meaning and as a result they prove themselves indisputably carnal.⁷

How did the figure of the carnal Jew come to function as a topos of early Christian literature?⁸ When did this topos first appear, and what purposes did it serve? How did the stereotype of the carnal Jew serve Christian leaders as they forged boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy, Christianity and Judaism? And what can the development of this topos tell us about ancient understandings of gender and sexuality?

This book explores these questions by examining the sexualized representation of Jews in writings by Greek church fathers from the first through fifth centuries CE. The construction of the Jew as a subject of perverse and excessive sexual desire was implicated in several major developments of the early Christian era. As Christian theologians developed methods for interpreting the Bible, the carnal, literal-minded Jewish reader served as a convenient foil for the spiritual Christian exegete. Moreover, as Christian leaders embraced practices of asceticism and sexual renunciation, the carnal, hypersexualized Jew served as a warning against indulging the appetites of the flesh. Christian theologians also used the stereotype of the fleshly Jew as a way to classify heresies. They figured the Judaizing heresy (the fall into Jewishness) as a degeneration from spirit to flesh, purity to impurity, health to sickness. And as the interests of Christian leaders began to dovetail with the interests of the empire, the figure of the carnal Jew served to dehumanize Jews and justify violent acts against them.

Situating Anti-Jewish Sexual Slander

The portrayal of cultural difference as sexual(ized) difference was nothing new in the ancient Mediterranean world, nor has it disappeared in modern times. Today, as then, visual and textual depictions of the Other as sexually deviant or abject serve as a rationale for state violence.⁹ In recent times, for instance, various representations of Muslim men as overly domineering, sexist, hyper-sexualized, homophobic, or effeminate have served as ways to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.¹⁰ In late antiquity, Christian preachers created disparaging sexual stereotypes of those whom they opposed. Heretics, pagans, and Jews, in particular, came under attack as Christian writers sought to define an orthodox Christian identity that was distinguished, significantly, by practices of bodily self-control and sexual purity. Christian writers portrayed these Others, alternately, as sexually aggressive or vulnerable. Their men were too feminine, their women too masculine, their bodies too wild, their morals too loose. The creation of an orthodox Christian attitude toward the body thus coincided with the construction of an abject heretical sexuality. Once Christianity became the religion of the state in the late fourth century, the construction of the heretical, Jewish, or Judaizing subject as perversely sexual functioned as a way for the church to justify the use of force against these groups.

As Christian writers began to define the boundaries of orthodoxy, they often encountered difficulties in tracing the border line between Christianity and Judaism, in particular. Christian writers framed their battles with heretics in this way: on the one hand were heretics who refused to use the Hebrew Bible altogether (such as Marcion); on the other hand were heretics who insisted on following Jewish law and practices according to biblical precepts (so- called Judaizers). Faced with such a diversity of attitudes toward Judaism, the writers of Christian orthodoxy defined a middle way: they appropriated the Hebrew Bible for Christian use while simultaneously distinguishing between Christian and Jewish practices, interpretations, and identities. Heresiology, or the representation of heresy, was thus largely caught up with the project of defining Christianness in relation to Jewishness.¹¹ The Christian use of sexual stereotypes to construct a carnal Jewish subject was part of this larger heresio-logical project to produce Jewish-Christian difference and identify practices that stood in opposition to orthodox Christian practice.

Early Christians and Jews shared not only a common scripture (the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament) but also common practices of piety. In some communities, Christians celebrated Easter at the same time as the Jewish Passover, and in other communities (such as Chrysostom’s Antioch), it is reported that Christians worshiped, fasted, and feasted with Jews. The creators of Christian orthodoxy reacted to these situations of proximity by expressing their desire for the Jews—their sacred scriptures, their God—and, simultaneously, their disavowal of this desire. Some of the fiercest anti-Jewish rhetoric occurred within the context of Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, where the dynamics of desire and disavowal were in full view. As Christians sought to claim the Bible as their own, they slandered their Jewish contemporaries, depicting them as overly licentious, immoral, and misguided interpreters of their own texts and traditions. Christian preachers turned the biblical prophets against Jews, accusing their Jewish and Judaizing contemporaries of the same crimes of adultery, prostitution, and impiety that the prophets claimed biblical Israel committed. Although sexual slander was a particularly useful tool for any ancient writer who wished to malign an individual, group, or culture, Christian sexual slander against Jews was particularly virulent because it occurred within this volatile context of cultural hybridity, in which the lines between Christian and Jew, orthodox and heretic, were in a constant state of negotiation and contestation.¹² Indeed, the church fathers’ continual enforcement of the boundaries between Christian and Jew exposed the instability of these categories of identity.

Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus have observed that hybridity inflects Jewish and Christian identity in precisely the places where ‘purity’ is most forcefully inscribed.¹³ Faced with borrowed and overlapping cultures, practices, and texts, early Christian preachers inscribed and, later, enforced the purity of Christianity by attending to the boundaries of their communities with the same strict vigilance with which they attended to the boundaries of the Christian body. The discourse of asceticism—which served to construct an ideal Christian subject of bodily and sexual purity—was accompanied by a rhetoric of dehumanization that characterized the Jew as sexually impure, promiscuous, immoral, diseased, and animalistic. The Jewish reprobate served as the negation of the Christian ascetic. This rhetoric of dehumanization, in turn, produced the conditions for the anti-heretical and anti-Jewish violence that would secure Christian dominance in the late ancient Mediterranean world.

Sexuality is an especially dense transfer point for relations of power, argues Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality.¹⁴ Foucault understands the category of sexuality as a specifically modern construction. Yet his insight into the relation between power and cultural understandings of sex applies not only to Western modernity (Foucault’s concern in the first volume of his aforementioned work) but also to the late ancient Mediterranean world, where discourses of sex and gender functioned as a dense transfer point for Christian assertions of power over Jews, Judaizers, and other heretics.¹⁵ The portrayal of relations of power between Christians and Jews shifted according to the changing contexts and needs of specific Christian communities and writers, from Paul to Origen to John Chrysostom. Chrysostom, in particular, used representations of Jewish and Christian sexualities to construct, amplify, and reiterate Christian power in a time that witnessed not only the rise of Christian asceticism but also the alignment of Christian identity with that of the empire. It is in this imperial context that late ancient Christian writers crafted discourses of sexuality not only to distinguish spiritual Christians from their carnal religious Others but also to justify the use of power and coercion against these enemies of Christ. The use of sexual stereotypes as justification for violence is a topic that serves as a touchstone throughout this study.

Early Christian authors (such as Origen and John Chrysostom) often found it useful to portray Jews and Judaizers as (male) aggressors who preyed upon innocent Christians (imagined here as victimized women). At other times, Christian writers maligned their Jewish and Judaizing counterparts by depicting them as soft, feminized men (malakoi) who were incapable of enforcing proper gender hierarchies within their households.¹⁶ Christians themselves were alternately cast as besieged women or courageous men. Such identifications across genders attest not only to the destabilization of gendered categories in late ancient Christianity but also to the ways in which church fathers utilized sexual slander to construct, reinforce, and contest traditional understandings of gender performance. Early Christian authors thus invoked sexuality, gender, and the body to produce Jewish-Christian difference and assert Christian dominance in an era that also witnessed the formation and (attempted) stabilization of Christian identity, the development of Christian asceticism, and the eventual triumph of Christianity as the religion of empire.

Theoretical Provocations

Categories such as Christian and Jew, far from being metaphysical givens, emerge over time in discourse and practice. Jewish and Christian subjects are historically constituted and constructed in relation to each other. Foucault’s insight into the formation of the subject proves useful here. In his earlier work, Foucault, following Nietzsche, argued that the constitution of the subject unfolds within the constraints of institutional and regulating power.¹⁷ In later work, Foucault subtly shifted his position to explore the techniques of power that the self used in relation to itself. Instead of focusing solely on how the modern subject is produced through regulatory powers outside itself, Foucault turned to antiquity to demonstrate how the self styles itself according to a certain ascesis. He writes that there is no sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject to be found everywhere…. I believe, on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity, on the basis, of course, of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment.¹⁸ Foucault thus insists on two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.¹⁹ Assujettissement (Foucault’s term for the making of the subject) signals the way that the subject is produced not only in relations of power that are beyond its control but also in the disciplinary practices to which the self subjects itself.²⁰ These practices of the self, Foucault observes, need not always be conceived as forms of coercion and control but, sometimes, as practices of freedom.

As Foucault and Judith Butler, among others, have insisted, the fact of the subject’s formation as subject to power does not mean that the subject lacks agency. Rather, assujettissement acts on a subject in a regulatory way and simultaneously enables the subject to intervene productively in its own formation.²¹ Assujettissement signals not only the formation of the self through subjection to external structures of power but also the opportunities for resistance, subversion, parody, and creative reappropriation of that very formation.

My interest in subjectivation and subject-defining rhetorics shapes the way that I approach the sermons, biblical commentaries, and treatises written by Christians about Jews in late antiquity. Although the Christian construction of the carnal Jewish subject went hand in hand with the subjection of Jews to Christian power, this construction—indeed, this subjection—was neither complete nor successful. The fact that Christian preachers in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, for instance, could endorse such violent acts as the burning of synagogues and the forced conversion of Jews did not mean that late ancient Jews were without power.²² Indeed, the very centuries in which Christian preachers and bishops authorized anti-Jewish violence also witnessed the flourishing of several Jewish communities, the formation of rabbinic identities, the development of rabbinic exegetical practices, and the construction of several major synagogues throughout Palestine (this despite imperial legislation that restricted the building of new synagogues).²³

Theorists of modern colonialism can help us to understand how discourses of power shape and are shaped by the material situation of historical subjects. In separate works that investigate different colonial encounters, Homi Bhabha, Robert J. C. Young, and Ann Laura Stoler explore the various ways that discourses of sexuality functioned within literary representations of colonial subjects.²⁴ Colonized people, they argue, were often represented as subjects of excessive, dangerous, or deviant sexual desires, and the threat of social and racial contamination was often depicted as a sexual threat. Asymmetrical power relations, dynamics of domination and resistance, and simultaneous constructions of ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality were some of the key features that characterized the late ancient Roman world. These are some of the cultural dynamics that postcolonial theory helps illuminate.²⁵ Postcolonial discourse analysis is also helpful for understanding late ancient texts insofar as it calls attention not only to the complex intersections of discourses (sexual, cultural, religious, and otherwise) but also to the material effects of such discourses.²⁶

In his analysis of Victorian race theory, Robert Young argues that sexuality stands in as a metaphor for cultural interaction and racial mixing in colonial discourse. Hybridity, conceived in this context as the mongrel product of illicit sexual encounters, threatens the purity of categories. This dangerous intermixture jeopardizes the clear boundaries between self and other, colonizer and colonized. As Young suggests, one effect of the sexual underpinnings of hybridity lies in the discursive association of the colonized Other with dangerous fecundity or deviant sexuality.²⁷ In European colonialist texts, he observes, racial degeneracy was often described as sexual degeneracy. Young’s insight about the mutual construction of race and sex helps to illuminate the church fathers’ simultaneous constructions of Jewishness and sex, where Jewishness was conceived as a marker of religious, ethnic, and cultural identity.²⁸ Early Christian accusations of Jewish sexual deviance and immorality occurred in a context of late ancient cultural hybridity—a context in which church fathers, faced with messy border lines between Christians and Jews, nevertheless sought to define Christianity and Judaism as pure, bounded, and distinct categories.

Homi Bhabha’s work on the stereotype in colonial discourse also provides a fruitful lens through which to examine Christian stereotypes of Jews. Bhabha argues: The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.²⁹ The stereotype functions as the major discursive strategy by which this objective is accomplished.³⁰ Bhabha’s analysis of the stereotype, moreover, exposes the ambivalence that underlies the colonialist desire to fix the identity of the Other.³¹ The colonial presence, writes Bhabha, is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference…. Its discriminatory effects are visible in those split subjects of the racist stereotype—the simian Negro, the effeminate Asiatic male—which ambivalently fix identity as the fantasy of difference.³² Bhabha’s conception of cultural difference as that which is both desired and disavowed provides a helpful framework for understanding the formation of Christian identity in relation to Jewishness. Likewise, his understanding of the stereotype as one of the major strategies of colonial discourse informs an exploration into early Christian stereotypes of Jews.

Christian writers such as Origen and John Chrysostom relied upon the stereotype to fix the identities of their opponents; yet the contexts of their writings suggest that religious identity was anything but fixed in third-century Alexandria and Caesarea and fourth-century Antioch. Bhabha’s work helps to illuminate the processes of subjectification made possible through stereotypical discourse, especially with regard to Chrysostom’s sermons. Bhabha’s theory sheds light on the ways in which the church fathers interpellated Jews as colonial subjects, worthy of domination and violence.

Such theories of colonialism help to elucidate the variety of ways that sexuality functioned as a dense transfer point for relations of power among late ancient Christians and Jews. Sexual slander operated as a rhetorical weapon that early Christians utilized to assert Christian dominance and to justify violence against Jews. Before examining Christian sexual slander against Jews, however, it is important to place these early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality in context by analyzing not only Jewish accusations of Gentile immorality but also other non-Christian portrayals of